


beautiful.

by clearascountryair



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, a little of everything I suppose, also definitely references Kassius the Kreep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-06
Updated: 2017-12-06
Packaged: 2019-02-11 04:11:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12927150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clearascountryair/pseuds/clearascountryair
Summary: Like most people, Jemma Simmons had an on-again-off-again relationship with beautiful.





	beautiful.

**Author's Note:**

> shout out to Casey and Lilly for reading this and validating me

When Jemma Simmons was five years old, her mother told her grandmother, “Why do you insist on calling her beautiful?  Don’t you have anything better to tell her?”

Her paternal grandmother sighed and said, “Well, Ana, she’s quite clever for a child.  But look at that face!” She reached out and cupped Jemma’s cheeks.  “What an incredible beauty!”

“Mama,” Jemma later asked on the drive home.  “Why can’t I be beautiful?”

Her mother sighed and her father turned around and squeezed her knee.  “You are beautiful, doc.  But Mama’s upset because stopping with just ‘beautiful’ is boring.”

“Why?”

“Because,” her mother said, “you don’t have to try to be beautiful.  You _are_ beautiful, Jemma, and nothing can change that.  But that’s not a compliment to you.  All you did to become beautiful was being born.  But smart and caring and compassionate?  You make yourself those things.  Not me, not Daddy, just you.”

“Can’t I be all?  Can I be beautiful _and_ smart and caring and c-c...”

“Compassionate.  It means you care very deeply for other people.”

“Can’t I?”

“Of course, you can.  And cleverness and caring and compassion will make you happy and successful and beloved.  Beauty is irrelevant.”

And so, for a very long time, Jemma Simmons did not care about being beautiful.

 

When she was twelve, Jemma was still short and too skinny and covered in too many freckles.  Her teeth were slightly crooked and her hair always found a way out of the two neat braids her mother had taught her how to do.  The other girls at university were tall with curves and straight teeth and pretty hair.  They dressed in nice clothes and their mothers never clucked their tongues and called them “ragamuffin.”

She called her mother crying on a Friday night.

“I wish I could make you happy, doc,” her mother said.

“I just want to be beautiful, Mama,” Jemma sobbed.  “Don’t be mad.”

“You’re twelve years old, darling.  Every twelve year old wishes to be different than she is.  Just most are surrounded by other twelve year old just as awkward.  You are so beautiful, Jemma, darling.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Jemma…”

“You said I’d be happy.”

“We can’t be happy all the time.”

“You said if I was smart and kind and compassionate, I’d be happy.”

“And you would give all that up to be beautiful?”

“ _Yes!_ ”

“So you want to drop out?  Come home?  Start again learning lessons you mastered before you were five?”

Jemma went quiet.

“Anyone who tells you they’ve never felt ugly is lying.  You _are_ beautiful, Jemma.  But you are a child.  So if a boy in class tells you you’re beautiful, it’s not a compliment.  You tell the police.”

Jemma sighed.  “I know, Mama.”

“Go to bed, darling.  And wake up knowing that you are just as beautiful as you are smart.”

 

She was seventeen exactly when she got her first boyfriend.  She walked out of the library at exactly 12:04 AM, just as he was walking in.  And he told her “Happy birthday” and “Has anyone ever told you how beautiful you are?” and “We should get coffee.”

She didn’t even pretend to think about it.

“He calls you beautiful a lot,” Fitz told her a month later, watching him walk away from their work station.

Jemma rolled her eyes.  “This is why you don’t have a girlfriend.  It doesn’t hurt to tell a girl she’s beautiful.  Anyway, he calls me smart, too.”

Fitz snorted.  “They’re not mutually exclusive.”

“Yes, case in point,” Jemma said, gesturing to herself.  “Anyway, why do you care?”

“Because we’re friends and he’s an ass.”

“Fitz, we’ve been over this and it’s literally the one thing I don’t care what you think about.”

“Bullshit.  You totally care, which is why you stopped shagging him.  But, to my point: he’s literally nine years older than you.  Honestly, I’m the only one here who can call you beautiful without sounding like a total pervert.”

Jemma turned to him.  She wanted to get mad, to shout at him, but couldn’t bring herself to.  “You think I’m beautiful?” she asked.

“It’s an objective fact, Simmons.  Don’t let it go to your head.”

Jemma grinned.  “But you think I’m beautiful,” she teased.

“‘Course, I do.  Beautiful, smart, annoying, decent lab partner.  It’s on my ‘How to Make Friends’ checklist.”

Jemma bumped her elbow against his.  “That’s my list exactly,” she said with a smile.  “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.  But, for what it’s worth…”

“I should break up with him?”

“Yup.”

 

When Jemma was twenty-eight, she stretched across a hotel room bed as Fitz kissed his way through the marbled map of scars on her stomach.

“You’re enchanting,” she felt more than heard him say.

“‘Enchanting?’” she repeated with a breathless laugh.  “My beauty isn’t something magical.  Just a...a…” she broke off momentarily as his lips continued on their path.  “Just a lucky combination of my parents’ genetics.”

She gasped at Fitz’s laughter upon her skin.  “I’m not talking about your beauty,” he said, moving back up her body.  With his forehead pressed to hers, her flipped them both so that they were lying on their sides, facing each other.  He tightened his arms around her.

“ _Fi-itz_ ,” Jemma whined.  She didn’t appreciate his teasing.

“Let me talk,” he said.  “And then I’ll go down on you.  Repeatedly, if you want.”

Jemma laughed.  “How romantic.”

Fitz kissed her nose.  “Your beauty...well, that’s just physical.  I’m attracted to how beautiful you are.  It’s aesthetically pleasing to look at you.”

“You flatter me.”

“Let me finish.  Your wit and your curiosity and your selflessness and your bravery and your...you.  The way you crave pancakes when you cry and crinkle your nose when you’re pleased.  They way you get really, _really_ inappropriately excited about examining dead things.  All of that plus that little bit of ‘She’s the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen’--that makes you enchanting.  I am...enthralled by you.”

Jemma bit her lip to quell its wobbling.  “You’ve made me cry,” she whispered.  “We were supposed to have sex and now I’m crying!”

Fitz grinned and brushed the tears from her cheeks.  “You’re really beautiful,” he said with a laugh, kissing her softly.  “I can’t help it.”

 

When Jemma Simmons was thirty years old, she missed the sound of her own heartbeat.  She could see her reflection in the pool in the garden and wondered if this was what people meant by ethereal beauty.

It was disgusting.

In her reflection, she could see beauty and grace and subservience.  But her wit and cleverness, her bravery and compassion, her ruthlessness and her dedication.  Her determination to keep the people she loved happy and safe--those were nowhere to be found.  Like the map of scars across her abdomen, they lurked out of sight, hidden where she could not see them.

But then, of course, neither could they.  They saw beauty and grace and subservience.  They called her “beautiful” like it was her name, her definition.

But Jemma Simmons was not a biologist for nothing.  And she knew, as well as anything else, that there was nothing more deadly than a beauty cornered.


End file.
